One of the results of the violent and shadowy post-9/11 clash between the interests of the Pakistani and American security states is the emergence of a fractured, but destructive 'Taliban' polity centered on North Waziristan. The 200+ CIA drone strikes in this area cannot and do not attempt to alter facts on the ground. The Pakistan Army tolerates drone strikes as well as hostile elements of the Taliban movement to preserve a deniable space needed to pursue its interests in Afghanistan and the region. Thus, for the first time it is the state east of the Khyber Pass rather than the people of the 'Tribal Agencies’ that resists the deeper integration of these areas with the plains of the Indus. The deliberately liminal sovereignty in the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands is magnified by the radical social and political change in the last decade driven by a welter of largely Deobandi affiliated militant groups. Sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing, these groups are divided both by conflicting local clan affiliations and notions of nationalist vs. transnationalist political religiosity. All of these unresolved contradictions and their regional reverberations will outlast current debates over the scope and intensity of direct US involvement in the area. At the deepest level they reflect the intense competition to define and secure what constitutes 'authentic' political and religious identity and authority in South and Central Asia. These contradictions and competitions continue to take new forms under conditions of modernity and globalisation, even while retaining deep roots in the colonial-era struggles of the Great Game and Partition. Unfortunately, what is often lost in all of this are the aspirations and needs of ordinary people in Waziristan and the tribal areas for development and democratisation on their own terms.

In an age of globalization, Iran struggles to control its frontier provinces where people, ideas, and technology transcend Iran’s national borders on a daily basis. With a population of approximately 70 million, only slightly more than 50 percent are seen as ethnic Persians. The remaining population considers itself Azeri, Arab, Kurd, Turkmen, Baloch or Lors. In recent years, these groups have consistently risen up and protested for greater cultural and political rights from Tehran only to be suppressed further. Iran is ethnically diverse and vulnerable to such rapid explosive global forces as the information revolution, forced migration, and the spread of instability from the two wars raging on its borders in Iraq and Afghanistan. The complexity and unpredictability of the relationship between Tehran and its frontier provinces is due in large part to the transborder populations that are shared between Iran and its seven neighbors: Iraq, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—not to mention its close proximity to the United Arab Emirates and other Arabian Peninsula countries. As of late, and similar to the greater organization witnessed among ethnic minority groups in Iran’s frontier provinces, Iranian Diaspora, consisting of millions across the globe, have begun to organize on a much wider scale than ever before in an attempt to undermine the current regime. More specifically, this paper will examine how these trends of globalization and ethnonationalism are interacting to destabilize Iran’s northwest Azerbaijan province and subsequent relationship with the Republic of Azerbaijan. After looking at the global and regional levels, this paper will focus on the domestic security challenge Azerbaijani ethno-nationalism presents in Iran today. Iran is under tremendous pressure today due to forces of globalization and the rise of ethnonational sentiment since September 11th, not to mention the recent Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Though Iran has grown emboldened politically in recent years, Iran’s frontier provinces have become increasingly difficult to control. This is not to say that the Iranian regime will collapse tomorrow. However, this is some of greatest amount of stress the Iranian regime has experienced in quite some time. As a result, control of Iran’s periphery and frontier provinces will grow increasingly difficult in the years to come.

Located at the edges of the Arab World and the African Continent, straddling the 20th and 21st centuries and the colonial and “post”-colonial worlds, the Sahrawi struggle for national independence has been entangled in shifting regional and international configurations, in which its prolonged struggle for self-determination remains unfulfilled. Based on anthropological research and fieldwork in the Sahrawi refugee camps, and in Spain among Sahrawi refugee-migrants, the paper examines Sahrawi nationalism within its historical, regional and global contexts, focusing on a number of foci, mainly: a) Spanish colonialism and the Moroccan occupation that followed; b) the role of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and its Program of National Action, albeit on “borrowed territory” in Algeria; c) the uneasy or neglected status of the Sahrawi national struggle in the Arab world which contrasts with the support it receives from a number of African and Latin American countries. Sahrawis officially recognize their “Arabness” and their belonging to the larger Arab-Islamic world. However, they are also embittered by both the neglect and what they perceive as a betrayal of their cause by their “brethrens”. With few exceptions most Arab governments have sided with the Moroccan position in its claims of sovereignty over the Territory. Similarly, Arab progressive organizations and nationalist forces either condemn the Sahrawi struggle as “separatist” threatening aspirations for Arab unity, or, have long abandoned the anti-colonial slogans and idioms as belonging to a bygone era. In this context, the paper looks analytically at the emphasis Sahrawis place on their “distinctive “culture” and the “reinvention of Sahrawi traditions”. It posits that not all claims to a unitary identity are by definition reactionary or carry a conservative agenda. Appealing to a homogeneous Sahrawi identity was necessary in an era when the United Nations recognized national rights only if claims to self-determination are aligned with a “people” under colonization. The paper concurrently discusses how the Sarhawis, including the “nation-state” has been constituted by extraterritorial assemblages (Sassen) and repositioning their cause in the “post-colonial” world, which like the Palestinians, had left them lagging behind, including a glance at the Sahrawi Intifada and its adoption of a global language that invokes human rights and civil peaceful protest.

This project examines Arab views of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s call for Pakistan—a state for South Asia’s Muslims. In particular, it focuses on Arab concerns that open support for this goal could legitimize Zionist calls for a Jewish state in the Palestine Mandate. It also analyzes the staunch opposition of Jinnah’s pro-Arab Muslim League to suggestions that Pakistan could provide any precedent for Israel. I argue that as various anticolonial groups in India, Pakistan, and Palestine drew closer to power, they took great care in the kinds of comparisons they made, or allowed others to make, between their cases. This argument is significant because it highlights the difficulties that transcolonial or transnational alliances can pose. It is therefore relevant to today’s world, in which the Tunisian and Egyptian regime changes demonstrate the power of such alliances—power that can sometimes lead to unintended consequences. In a mid-1947 interview with Jinnah in the Egyptian newspaper Akhbar al-Yaum, Taqiuddin al-Solh emphasized “the difficulties for the Arabs if they approved Indian Muslims’ stand on the partition because their approval of this principle would provide justification to the Zionist for partitioning Palestine.” Jinnah and his top advisors understood the Arab position well. After Pakistan’s independence, its Foreign Minister, Zafrullah Khan, made several eloquent pro-Arab speeches during the November 1947 debate over the partition plan proposed by the United Nation Special Commission of Palestine, emphasizing differences between the situation in South Asia and that in Palestine. The story this paper tells is that of a delicate dance between allies eager to support each other where possible without damaging their own causes. Focusing on the crucial years after World War II, this paper is part of a larger project examining imperial and anti-colonial links between South Asia and Palestine during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Transcolonial history—a focus on the flow of people and ideas across colonial and mandatory boundaries—provides my methodological framework. My conclusions rest on primary sources gathered from published Palestinian sources, in English and in Arabic, and from archival research in Britain, the United States, and Israel. The most useful sources have been correspondence and memoirs of nationalist leaders, British government documents, and interviews shedding light on Palestinian memories of the years leading up to 1948. By the time I present this paper I will have completed additional archival research in India (and possibly Pakistan, depending on the security situation there).

This paper aims to explore the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century history of the frontier between modern-day Libya and Egypt through the lens of the Sanusi Islamic Brotherhood (Sanusiyya)—a revivalist, Sufi-inflected religious order that established itself in the middle of the expansive Libyan Desert in the early-1840s. A mere half-century after its founding, the Sanusiyya had become a major power-broker in the amorphous desert territory that comprised the western-most reaches of Egypt and the eastern portion of Ottoman-administered Libya (the province of Benghazi). Historians of the modern Middle East have tended to adopt, unquestioningly, a well-worn narrative of Egypt’s uniquely successful rise among Ottoman provinces in the nineteenth century as a modern centralizing nation-state, without critically examining the question of what state sovereignty looked like in any of its far-off marginal territories, such as the northwest Mediterranean coastline or the Libyan (Western) Desert. My analysis of Sanusi authority along Egypt’s western frontier seeks to provide a necessary revision along these lines. First, I will analyze Sanusi practices of education, justice, and warfare, as well as cross-border economic linkages and regional notions of sacred geography, in order to demonstrate how local conceptions of space, politics, and identity among the (mostly bedouin) population over which the Sanusiyya held sway countered the efforts of the Egyptian authorities in Cairo to construct a cohesive territorial nation-state. Second, I will argue that the Sanusiyya practiced a distinctive border politics that succeeded by capitalizing on the unresolved question of state power at the frontier, given that the nature of the Ottoman-Egyptian relationship – particularly in relation to control over borderlands – was wholly ambiguous. Ultimately, I hope that my study of the Sanussiyya will offer a broader sort of social history of the Egyptian West in the decades leading up to World War I, and point the way towards a new approach to the thorny issues of local politics and identity, as well as Ottoman and Egyptian territorial sovereignty, in the era of the modern centralizing nation-state.